Chapter 4: An English Interlude

This fourth extract from my unpublished memoirs ' The Adventures of an Itinerant Executive' describes my sojourn in England , working in the British Market Research industry in the mid eighties.

After leaving Sri Lanka and following a brief vacation in Delhi, I left Karti and the children at my parents' home and flew to London. It was February 1984. I was received at Heathrow airport by John O’Brien, a senior executive of British Market Research Bureau (BMRB). He took me to my bed and breakfast hotel in Ealing, a suburb of London, where the office was located. I was given a tiny room in which there was barely enough room to swing a cat. After an uncomfortable night on a lumpy mattress, I complained to the manager who shifted me to a larger room on the ground floor with a view of the small garden.

 In March 1984 the miner’s strike led by Arthur Scargill of the National Union of Mineworkers, that was intended to shut down Britain’s coal industry, took place. He was met with fierce opposition by Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s Prime Minster whose firm treatment of the strike earned her the sobriquet ‘The Iron Lady’. 26 million man days were lost in the strike, making it the most bitter industrial dispute in British history.

 In 1984, London was not nearly the cosmopolitan city that it is today. The British appeared to be insular, suspicious of foreigners and their usual reserve made it hard to make friends quickly. I was the first brown skinned senior executive in the history of the company and my English colleagues did not quite know what to make of me. My boss was a bearded soft spoken man called Simon Orton who was clearly a good researcher but had no idea how to make a newcomer feel warm and welcome. The general impression was that I was some sort of experiment that John Goodyear wished to indulge in, in order to expand his empire globally and they wanted no part of it.

 I found a two bedroom flat in a residential building near the office in Ealing for which the rent was an exorbitant GBP 80 per week. Despite being paid an annual salary of GBP 16,000 (quite generous in those days) after social security and tax payments, I was left with barely GBP 550 per month out of which nearly two thirds went in paying rent. Karti arrived at Heathrow airport a couple of weeks later on an Air India aircraft named Kanishka, which had to make an unscheduled stop in Rome due to a bomb threat. She was exhausted after this harrowing experience and having to manage our two boisterous boys. 

Since I was still not familiar with London roads, I handed her the ‘London A to Z’ a book containing maps of London’s complicated road system and asked her to navigate our way home. In her exhausted, jet lagged state my poor wife did a commendable job and I drove her and the kids home in the new Vauxhall Cavalier given to me by the company - a large sedan, perfect for touring the British countryside with a small family.

 When I started driving in London, I found that I was one of the most aggressive drivers on the road. Other drivers would stare at me and some were irritated enough to blow their horns. I realised that I was bringing the aggressive driving techniques of the subcontinent to British roads and this was wholly unnecessary. British drivers were among the most civilised in the world , would never use their horns and would always stop for pedestrians. This was quite unlike drivers in India who drove with their horns blaring and whose primary intent appears to be to mow down any pedestrian who crosses their path. The law permitted me to drive using my Indian licence for up to one year. I registered for a driving test after taking the mandatory lessons. I thought I had done quite well in the test and was shocked to learn that I had failed! The instructor informed me that one had to look into the rear view mirror three times before changing lanes to ensure that no vehicle was in one’s blind spot and this had to be done slowly and deliberately. I then realised why driving in Britain was so civilised and so chaotic in India.

 Even in the 1980s, the population of England had started ageing and there were hardly any children in the neighbourhood. Apart from our neighbours on the same floor – a young Lebanese couple – and ourselves, no other families in the building appeared to have children living with them. The building was deathly quiet at all hours of the day or night. Mr. and Mrs.Tuffee, an elderly couple who lived in the flat above us, hated the noise our kids made and insisted on our keeping the volume of our TV set so low that we could barely hear it. This was not made easier by the thin walls and floors that modern buildings in the UK seemed to be have. When the TVs volume was high, they would express their displeasure by banging on the floor of their flat with a stick. We put up with this for a while. However, when this happened a few times, we retaliated by banging the roof of our flat with a large broom used to clean cobwebs, even harder. This shut the Tuffees up and we realised that they were not so tough after all.

I gradually started to work on various projects with different clients and discovered that market research in Britain was not much more sophisticated than in far away India or Sri Lanka. Of course, the British had made advances in areas such as ‘geo-demographics’ which is the science of combining data on the geographic location of consumers with demographic information to pinpoint the exact locations of potential consumers for marketers. This was done by combining UK census data with the UKs brilliant postal coding system which identifies households on a single street and overlaying this with survey data. It is therefore possible to identify the demographic characteristics of a street in, say, Ealing and estimate the percentage of households that have, for example, a Whirlpool refrigerator, on that street.

 BMRB also did an interesting survey called ‘HASS’ – the Home Accidents Survey that found out what kinds of mishaps people had at home. The data was used to advise companies to design safer products

 Every week we would have the ‘ADS and SADS’ meeting. This was attended by the Associate Directors and Senior Associate Directors of the company to discuss important outstanding issues. One agenda item , a perennial favourite, was the allocation of parking slots in the company’s parking lot which was too small to accommodate the burgeoning number of cars owned by staff.

 We spent several weekends in the UK exploring the countryside by car and drove to Stonehenge and Bath on one occasion and to Torquay on the coast where we rented a caravan, on another. The glorious country roads of England and the warm weather in summer were a sheer delight. We also visited HMS Belfast, the Royal Naval ship which is now a museum, anchored on the Thames. My father had served on the HMS Belfast during the Korean war in 1950-52 ( he was the only Indian Naval officer to fight in this war) as a young midshipman in the Royal Indian Navy, so it was of special interest to us.

 While in London, I explored the possibility of working with some of the other MRB Group companies and worked on several projects with the European Market Research Bureau which specialised in multi -country research across Europe. I found that the staff of EMRB were a fun lot and far more interesting than the BMRB people, possibly because some of their staff were originally of European descent and had now become British citizens.

I also met the head of Mass Observation (MO), Adam Philips. MO was an MRB company which was founded in 1937 to create ' an anthropology of ourselves' . They recruited a team of observers and volunteer writers to study the lives of ordinary people in Britain. A National Panel of Diarists composed of people from across the country who kept diaries and responded to questionnaires about their daily lives. This work continued through the second world war till 1949 and resulted in influencing public policy in areas such as recruiting for the war effort, war propaganda and taxation policy. MO later became part of the MRB Group. After this, the focus shifted to commercial market research . The original Mass Observation idea was revived in 1981 and continues to this day providing academics and researchers a rich source of material on all aspects of life in Britain. 

 An interesting feature of the BMRB office building was our very own wine bar on the ground floor where we could eat a light lunch and drink wine if we chose to. I often played squash with colleagues from the office during the lunch hour, followed by a pint of beer, in the pub next door. This sort of thing was unheard of in India where everybody seemed to take their jobs too seriously to take an hour’s break from work in the middle of the day.

The company held an office party in Central London for Christmas and being unfamiliar with the roads, I took the tube. One of the party games involved guessing the weight of a gigantic Christmas cake. My guess was the most accurate and I had to carry a huge box of cake back to Ealing at midnight while negotiating various escalators in the tube stations. On another occasion, I was travelling home late at night on the tube from London and was the sole passenger on the platform. I was accosted by a young man who appeared to be an emaciated drug addict. He asked me for money and threatened to attack me with a knife if I resisted. Looking at his weak physique , I refused and told him that I would push him onto the tracks if he tried. This was sufficient to frighten the poor fellow away.

 Having spent a few month’s doing moderately interesting work at BMRB, it became apparent that John’s own star was fading within the JWT Group and his grandiose plans for expansion of the group had been stymied. Finding acceptance as a foreigner in BMRB was still proving to be an uphill task and I asked for a move to Mass Observation. Adam Philips was a dynamic manager and quickly involved me in a range of interesting work. It was a smaller company than BMRB, however and room for growth was limited.

 In October 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated and we watched the aftermath of the riots in Delhi on BBC television. Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as Prime Minister and it soon became apparent that the Indian economy would be moving to a new phase of liberalisation.

 After a few months in MO, I decided to that it was time to move back to India and take advantage of the emerging opportunities in India. By now I was clear that I did not want to live in England indefinitely. Arjun was about to enter Primary school and I felt that it would be best if the children received an education in India. At that time, knowing one Indian language was important to being successful in school and if we were to return to India, this was the time to do it, for the sake of the kids.

 I contacted Ramesh Thadani, General Manager of IMRB and he readily agreed that I should return as Deputy General Manager, to be based in Delhi, as promised by Subhas Ghosal. 

 On my last working day, I went down to my garage and sat in my car as I was taking it back to the company to return it. While doing that I accidentally touched the car’s horn which made a shrill noise that startled me. I realised that this was the first time that I had actually heard the horn of my own car since I never had to use it before !

 We left London by air from Heathrow airport, less than eighteen months after I had arrived there, with a large amount of hand baggage. While I had airfreighted most of our belongings to Delhi, I was carrying a small stereo system in a brief case. We completed our check -in process and were about to go through a security check when the English security guard pointed to the brief case and said that it was too large and needed to be checked in. This was patently absurd since the bag was perfectly within permissible limits and several people ahead of me in the line and in another one being supervised by a black lady guard, had larger ones. The check- in counters were some distance away and had I returned to do his bidding, I may have missed the flight. It was also apparent that he was being racist and unpleasant. After stepping out of line, I decided to defy the guard, walked across to the other line and had the black lady wave me through. Unfortunately, this was my last – and lasting - impression of England in the 1980s.

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